Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In this letter to Gonzalo Ariza published in Bogotá-based newspaper El Tiempo, Austrian-born critic Walter Engel responds to statements by Ariza, a Colombian artist, published in the same newspaper a few days earlier. Engel asserts that the fact [...]

In this article, artist and critic Jorge Moreno Clavijo contemplates the question of whether Colombian art is at its height or in a state of decline. To answer that question, he calls on artists Erwin Kraus, Gonzalo Ariza, Alipio Jaramillo, Luis [...]

In this article, poet and art critic Jorge Gaitán Durán takes stock of the activities that took place on the Colombian art scene in 1946. He begins with a reflection on the overall state of the visual arts in the country. He asserts that 1946 [...]

The exhibition 32 artistas de las Américas was held in Bogotá from February 7–17, 1949. The show was one of the cultural activities promoted by the Visual Arts Unit of the Cultural Affairs Department of the Pan American Union/General Secretariat [...]

Based on an interview with Gonzalo Ariza, this article, by the journalist Álvaro Monroy Caicedo, sets forth the opinions of this Colombian painter on the superiority of Eastern over Western art. He gives his opinions on Latin American art, art [...]

This catalogue was published by the Banco de la República of Colombia in February 1963 in conjunction with the exhibition of twenty-three paintings from the bank’s Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango art collection. The exhibition was held in the [...]

Marta Traba responds to a column that Colombian artist Gonzalo Ariza had published a few days before in the newspaper El Independiente. In her biting retort, Traba denies that she had recommended imitating Argentine artist Emilio Pettorutti (and [...]

In the introduction to his book “Nueve artistas colombianos” [Nine Colombian Artists], poet and art critic Jorge Zalamea explains the objectives of the publication, and discusses the Colombian art scene of the early forties. Zalamea starts out [...]

This article published in the “Lecturas Dominicales” or Sunday Readings section of the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo (April 1962) evidences the polemic surrounding abstract and figurative art in Colombia at the time. In the introduction to the [...]

In this article, poet and critic Luis Vidales expresses his position on the debate surrounding abstract and figurative art, a polemic central to Colombian art at the time. First, Vidales argues that certain concepts have been poorly defined in [...]

This article formulates the question of artistic freedom from the perspective of the dominance of abstract over figurative tendencies, which Colombian painter Gonzalo Ariza attributes to cultural agents, critics, and art dealers active in Colombia in [...]

This article provides a brief overview of Colombian art and a diagnosis of its general state in 1942. Luis Alberto Acuña asserts that Colombian art history can be divided into three distinct periods: the pre-Hispanic, the viceregal, and the [...]

This is the second part of the article “Primeras etapas de la abstracción en Colombia II” [First Stages of Abstraction in Colombia II] that critic María Elvira Iriarte published in issue 23 of the Revista Arte en Colombia. In this text, she [...]